Rivers Run
by Dream Pyre
Summary: Genetics, colors, eugenics without the name, a god crafted as a reward, and a slightly more practical way for Kira to win against the criminals. Possibly a vague bit of horror in here due to said eugenics, but no more than Death Note already has. Edited.


Edited, for typos and minor stylistic elements. This is Light again, probably mutually exclusive with my other Light characterization, but perhaps this is just Light earlier in the series or when he's under self control, and the other one is when he loses self control and admits how messed up he is to himself. Or maybe it just doesn't matter seeing as it's all fiction anyway…. Oh, and on a sidenote, I have seen occasional scientific studies talking about the search for a criminal gene and how to pinpoint its location. Enjoy.

* * *

Rivers run in colors.

Some blue, some green, some brown, some black and gray and yellow and orange and whatever other colors are in the mud or dirt or rocks or chemicals in it. Some rivers, though, run red.

Life has two rivers, Light thinks. It has the watery stream and ocean and lake and air, all linked together no matter what your eye says, because water flows from the highest mountain to the deepest sea, rises, and lands on the top of another mountain. All the water in the world is connected, moving and changing and one.

The second life river is not like that. Water is a vast network, but life—blood—flows differently. Blood branches, starts in one pool where it flows and twists and follows itself much like water does, but then it splits and flows off in one or two or ten little streams, which go into their own pools and never go back to the first. And they loop and follow themselves within their own pool, then split again, and go on to another pool. Often two streams flow together to form one new pool, but they never go back to an older one. And all the time the pools and streams are spreading like a net or a forest, over the entire face of the earth and time.

And this second life river has far more colors than the first. The first is colored by what is around it, by the sky or sun or the dirt it passes through. The second, however, is colored from within—bright red, mostly, with little streaks as if someone dropped a capsule of color into a stream between one pool and another, making a streak of mutation color to flow down through the stream, into the pool, and maybe into the pools that come from that one. Most of these colors are fine—Light has no problem with blond hair or green eyes or white skin.

The only bad color in the second stream, Light thinks, is the sick one. It isn't so much its own color as it is a change to the other colors—twisting them and making the good colors bad, clogging the pool and stream, and when it's splashed, sometimes clogging and tainting nearby pools as well. Light can't see the pools so clearly, of course, but he knows it's there—at least one. There may be more, variants of the color, but if there are Light doesn't care. They may pollute the other colors in different ways, but they all damage them somehow, and since there's no way to tell whether there's only one or many, you need to get rid of all of the many, even the ones that aren't as bad as the rest, to be sure that you've gotten rid of the worst in case there's only one.

Why no one else tries to remove the sick color, Light has never understood. He even knows that they know it's there—he's seen scientific journals of studies on what it does and researchers trying to locate it. But no one does anything to get rid of the sick color at all.

So Light will. There are too many pools for him to remove them all by himself, no matter what power the Death Note gives him, but he can make a good start. The bad color doesn't always show itself when it's in a pool, so he can't simply eliminate every pool that the color is in—though it would be so easy if he could—but he can eliminate all the ones he sees it in. He wishes he could simply eliminate all the pools connected to one it's in—but there's no telling which of the two that went into a pool the color came from, and since it doesn't always go into a new pool, he can't eliminate the pools that come from a pool with the sick color either. So he waits, and gets rid of the pools that he finds the sick color in, and knows that, if every pool it appears in is eliminated for long enough, someday the color will be completely gone.

So Light plans. He will eliminate as many pools as he can, and when he has to, he will find a successor to continue for him. Perhaps it will be his son—that would be good, he thinks, in case his beliefs and dedication are a color themselves, or a rare combination of colors. But, perhaps not—L, he has to admit, is as dedicated as he, and he wonders, sometimes, if L had grown up with his life and name, and he with L's, if anything at all would have changed. And there's no more guarantee that his good color would be passed down than that the sick color would.

And, to get the best chance of a successor who can continue Light's task, he'll make the whole world want to. If everyone wants to be his successor, there will be no chance of an ideal successor choosing to be something else. So Light takes all the ideas he is given—a god, because what can a human become that is more desirable than that, as Ryuk made him think, with the name that the admirers call him by, the relationship and life that everyone else wants, and lets them believe he does what he does for whatever reason they prefer. Humans are predictable; if he does what they want him to, they will assume he is doing it for the reasons they want it done. And as long as they believe that—well, a successor who doesn't agree with him isn't a very good successor, anyway. With a whole world to choose from, Light is certain that a successor with his abilities and his beliefs can be found.

So Light continues, and he waits. He destroys the pools with the sick color in them to keep the color from continuing, and sets himself up to be what everyone will wish to be. And someday, probably generations and centuries after Light, but someday, the second rivers of life will run, once again, untainted by the sick color.

After all, Light knows, rivers run in colors, but colors fade and rivers run dry.


End file.
